PERQ
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PERQ, often referred to as the Three Rivers PERQ, was an influential computer workstation first released in 1979. The workstation was conceived by five former Carnegie Mellon University employees that formed the startup Three Rivers Computer Corporation in 1974. One of the founders, Brian Rosen, had worked at Xerox PARC on the Dolphin. The system was a direct descendant of the original workstation, the Xerox Alto. PERQ was the first commercially available personal workstation. The company entered into a deal with ICL, a British computer company, for European distribution, and eventually some co-development and manufacturing. The origin of the name "PERQ" is from the word perquisite. Three Rivers Computer Company went out of business in 1986, largely due to competition from upstart workstation manufacturers such as Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics.
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[edit] Technical specifications
There are three official PERQ models that were released: the original PERQ (also known as the PERQ 1), the PERQ T-1 (1981), and the PERQ T-2 (1982). All PERQ workstations used discrete logic microcoded CPUs instead of microprocessors. The later PERQ models looked more like workstations such as the Xerox Star and had a more standard square-shaped monitor than the original page-shaped monitor (more height than width). The PERQ 1 configuration was 256K of 16-bit memory, 12 or 24 MB of hard disk storage, and an instruction speed of 1 MIPS. The original PERQ had 2 expansion slots and two communications ports: one IEEE-488 connection and one RS-232 serial port. PERQ 1s had the ability to use Ethernet with a special expansion card in its OIO slot; later PERQs had up to two built-in Ethernet ports. All PERQ workstations had options for both a laser printer and a dot-matrix printer and could also be interfaced to DEC PDP-11s or other PERQs using the special 16-bit PERQlink interface.
[edit] Operating systems
The default operating system for PERQ workstations was POS (PERQ operating system). Other operating systems available for the PERQ included MPOS (POS with multitasking), Accent (sometimes with QNIX, a Unix add-on), PNX (another Unix variant), and FLEX. Accent was a multitasking operating system developed at Carnegie Mellon University that predated the Mach kernel which many later operating systems would use. FLEX was somewhat similar to other workstation systems such as Lisp machines and workstations running microcoded UCSD Pascal or Modula-2, except that the language of choice was Algol 68.
[edit] Miscellaneous PERQ software and uses
Perq was a microcoded machine, and its default instruction set was a variant of P-Code which was optimized for Pascal. The operating system and utilities were all written in Pascal. In fact it was generally more efficient to use Pascal than to attempt to create "assembler" programs directly with P-Code.
The PERQ was a popular early graphical workstation; therefore, it helped spawn many early third-party applications that took advantage of the graphical user interface and bitmapped graphics. Intran (around 1982) produced a pioneering graphical program suite called MetaForm, which consisted of the separate Graphics Builder, Font Builder, Form Builder, and File Manager programs. The PERQ also served as a dedicated platform for several pioneering hypertext programs, such as ZOG and Guide.
Perq schematics were drawn using DP (drawing package), a CAD system written by Dario Giuse, which ran on the Perq.
